Thank You; Some Latvian; Don't be a Tiger; Interim; Foot Shortages; Metro Line #3; US Election interest; Jaws;

Thank you, very rare reader, for visiting my blog.  I hope you will read this entry to the end.

Es esmu Andis.  Es dzīvoju Ķīnā.  Es studēju latviešu valodu.

Don't be a tiger.  You may think that is the way to deal with a problem or something going wrong, but ultimately, people walk on eggshells around you.  As Doctor Johnson said, someone may think that walking around and be mighty and screaming at people earns them respect and high esteem, but in fact everyone acts like they are around a tiger who will bare his teeth at any moment.

For some people, happiness is the brief interim between periods of temper tantrums.

I read a story on the Internet that China was going to have food shortages.  This was because being communist it was unable to feed the people they ruled and thus had to rely on exports from western countries to do so.

Later at a Speaker's Corner (I resumed doing them again), I had a student tell me that Chairman Xi saying something about not wasting food caused panic buying of rice among locals.

I learned from a student at the Speaker's Corner (SPC) that the third line of the Wuxi Metro was entirely underground, so there was no point to riding it for sightseeing from it.

The students at the SPC were very interested in the US election, though from what I could gather, for entertainment.

My son Tony asked me to download the film Jaws for him.  He found out somehow that the movie was very popular in the 1970s.  I remember that I was in Quebec when the film came out and listening to classmates who were eager to tell others that they had gone to the cinema to see the film; and that sharks were really cool.  I had a poster of a shark from a magazine that I "lent" to someone and then had the hardest time getting them to return it.  I even bought a book about the making of the film, though I never did get around to seeing in the cinema.

The bakery, where I always buy the bread, we put in our fancy German toaster, was selling baguettes: those long tube-shaped pieces of crusty French bread.  When I saw them, I immediately decided to give it a try.  So, I bought a baguette and three packages of the bread we use for toasting.  When I went to the counter, the clerk put the three packages of bread in the normal bag.  I noticed that as she did that, she was hesitant about what to do about the baguette.  My toast-bread then in the bag, she made a slicing motion to me.  I shook my head in the negative.  It seems that the locals want the baguettes sliced into smaller pieces because they find their length to be an inconvenience.